Sean Michael Kerner

UPDATED: In a surprise move, Sun Microsystems today said it’s acquiring privately held open source database vendor MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion. The move is a bold one for Sun, which analysts note has been under pressure to make money from its Solaris enterprise software since it began offering it as open source. MySQL […]

As part of its continuing effort to humanize the Web, open source browser vendor Mozilla is getting some new humans for its development effort. John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, confirmed in an e-mailed statement sent to InternetNews.com that Mozilla has hired three of the principals from Humanized, a small user interface development startup. The president […]

While “CSI” is well known in popular culture thanks to the “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” TV shows, the former head of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is pushing a different use of the acronym. Stuart Cohen’s CSI is the Collaborative Software Initiative, an organization he started after the Linux Foundation absorbed the OSDL a […]

Four times a year Oracle issues its Critical Patch Update (CPU) to address security vulnerabilities in its technologies. According to database-security firm Sentrigo, Oracle’s efforts may well be underutilized by its users. Sentrigo found that only 10 percent of respondents in a study of Oracle User Group attendees reported they were up to date and […]

Last year had been tough for Apple’s QuickTime software, with numerous security vulnerabilities making headlines. So far, it looks as if 2008 may continue the unfortunate security trend. Security researcher Luigi Auriemma reported that a buffer overflow condition exists in version QuickTime 7.3.1. According to Auriemma’s advisory, the problem is a buffer-overflow, which happens during […]

Reporter’s Notebook: Nearly every year for the last decade I’ve heard some pundit or vendor proclaim from the rooftops: This is the year of the Linux desktop. Yet, year in and year out, the proclamations don’t materialize. With the innovations in the release of KDE 4 (K Desktop Environment) this week, the pundits are at […]

With a new visual interface including new themes sounds and effects as well as a semantic file manager, speed and multimedia handling improvements, KDE 4 is a major release for the Linux desktop. While many of KDE 4’s new features will be visible to end users, a lot of work has been done under the […]

Though SSL VPNs have been around for over a decade, they are still competing against their traditional rival IPsec VPNs. SSL VPN vendor Aventail is now blurring the lines between technologies integrating some key IPsec features into its new Aventail 9.0 SSL VPN product lineup. The new release from Aventail is the first since Aventail […]

Ethernet use is continuing to grow in carrier transport as new capabilities are being rolled in that make it more like the legacy technologies it is attempting to displace. As Ethernet rises, ATM and SONET/SDH are declining though neither technology is dead yet. Those are some of the conclusions in a new study from Infonetics […]

One of the key reasons that Mozilla and its technologies are open source is the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Now, the closely watched MPL may be seeing an update after remaining unchanged for years. The MPL is one of the defining features of the Mozilla Foundation, its related entities and products — providing users with […]

The newest version of the popular RPM package manager is now out with improved performance and functionality. But there’s a bit of a catch with RPM version 5.0. Linux vendor Red Hat officially considers RPM 5.0 a project fork. “RPM5 is a fork of RPM, and is not related to RPM.org,” Daniel Riek, Product Manager […]

Thousands of people are involved in the Linux development community, many of them lending their voices to the project on any given day. But when one voice in particular speaks, people listen: Linus Torvalds, the benevolent creator and dictator of the Linux kernel.org effort, has thrown his weight in favor of the GPL version 2 […]